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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25021789">I Am Home</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenMegaera/pseuds/QueenMegaera'>QueenMegaera</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Gen, Light on the shipping, M/M, Missing Scene, WW2, War, heavy on the wartime trauma</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 07:08:27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,456</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25021789</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenMegaera/pseuds/QueenMegaera</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>After their confrontation over the wood pile, Tony wants Steve to clarify a thing or two. <br/>Or, Steve really disagrees with Tony's point of view but really likes the way he looks in a flannel.<br/>Or, Tony disagrees with Steve's point of view but really likes the way he looks shirtless.<br/>Or, Steve and Tony discuss the inherent moral dilemmas of warfare.<br/>Or, Steve and Tony both have horrific memories of their wartime experiences dragged to the surface. <br/>Yes, it's all those things. Apparently I wrote that.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Steve Rogers/Tony Stark</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>27</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>I Am Home</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Dialogue heavy. Inspired by the Punisher Netflix series, of all things. But the whole vision-of-loved-one-telling-former-military-man-the-war-is-over-and-he-can-go-home-but-man-realising-this-is-home-now-parallell between Punisher season one and Steve's journey in Age of Ultron was just to juicy to pass up.</p>
<p>Stony because that’s my head canon, my OTP, my ship of ships. And canon in at least one Marvel universe (check that out).</p>
<p>Hints of internalized homophobia, because I think Steve is probably a little bit repressed when it comes to sexuality in general. Also hints of PTSD, because to Steve the war was just a few years ago and he hasn't exactly relaxed since. Oh, and Tony is f**d up. We all know that, right?</p>
<p>This was originally meant to be a much longer fic more focused on the pairing, but I wrote this part years ago, forgot all about how I'd intended it to continue, and wrote a short ending to it instead.</p>
<p>Warning for vivid descriptions of the kind of horrors that went on during WW2 (and have been going on since in various parts of the world).</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span class="u">I am Home</span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>The war is over. You can go home.</em>
</p>
<p>They didn’t tell each other about the visions Wanda Maximoff had given them. Something had sent Banner and the Other Guy into what seemed to be a deeper rage than usual, something had shaken up Natasha (the signs that she was shaken were infinitesimal, but even that was disturbing), and something had made Tony grind his jaw in determination and seem to double down on his usual self-loathing (which he hid almost as well as Natasha hid her demons, but the exaggerated boasting and posturing had long since given him away in Steve’s eyes). But Steve had no idea what that something had been, for either of them.</p>
<p>Natasha had said: ”Bad stuff. Old stuff. None of your business stuff,” in response to what she had seen, and that had been that.</p>
<p>Thor had seen something so bad it had seemed more urgent to him than their current situation with Ultron, and had made him take off.</p>
<p>Tony had refused to make eye contact when Steve had asked him about what he’d seen, being the first of them to get hit. All he'd said was: ”She was trying to rattle us. Exploiting our darkest fears. It’s psychic propaganda, it doesn’t actually mean anything. ” Which Steve felt was at least somewhat of a contradiction – surely an individual's deepest, darkest fear, pulled straight from their own mind, <em>meant</em> something – and he also noted that Tony had dodged any personal reply by talking about <em>them </em>instead of<em> him. </em>More than once since Maximoff had whammied Tony, out of the corner of his eyes, Steve had caught Tony looking at him with a look of pain on his face, and Steve worried that he’d somehow been part of whatever Tony had seen that haunted him so.</p>
<p>Tony, of course, had retaliated by asking what Steve had seen. Steve had felt unable to tell him. Everyone else seemed to have witnessed horrors: bad memories, nightmares, apocalyptic scenarios. Steve had seen Peggy. He’d gotten his dance. That was about as far from horror as you could come. Wasn't it? Yes, he thought he'd seen the drunken people around them fight and bleed and fall over, but it had been a party. A peace celebration. Peggy had told him the war was over and he could go home.</p>
<p>Go home with her.</p>
<p>Somehow, that had unnerved him completely, and he didn’t think it was just because he knew that the real Peggy was in a hospital bed, mind and body slowly withering away. It still should have been a nice thought, a wonderful dream, one that it was painful to wake up from. Instead he'd been relieved – although he was ashamed to say it – to wake up to the chaos of a battle gone wrong and a shaken Avengers crew.</p>
<p>How could he explain what his nightmare had been to the people around him who would probably want nothing more than to be able to take the hand of a loved one and leave the battle behind? He could barely explain it to himself.</p>
<p>
  <em>Isn't that the mission? Isn't that the why we fight? So we can end the fight, so we get to go home ?</em>
</p>
<p> Steve sighed.</p>
<p>Fury had reappeared and called a meeting in the kitchen in an hour, and Steve headed upstairs to have a shower and a change of clothes before it was time for another confrontation. In the guestroom he had been assigned, he took off his t-shirt, wet with sweat from the exertion of chopping a couple of trees' worth of wood for the Barton household. If he was honest with himself, maybe some of it was due to the emotional exertion of arguing with Tony, too. Workouts barely made him break a sweat anymore, but stress could still set it off just as easily as it had before his transformation, when his hands would go clammy at the bare hint of an upcoming fight; the knowledge of the pain to come, the knowledge that he'd lose, the determination to go through with it anyway, every time. A tiny stickfigure-shaped art student with sweat pearling on his forehead, unable to back down in the face of a bully because he knew the psychological pain of surrender was worse than any pain the punches could cause.</p>
<p>Because he had backed down, once. Never again.</p>
<p>”Do you really believe in that stuff?”</p>
<p>Steve swirled around to see Tony standing in the door, hands in his pockets, shoulder leaning against the doorframe, legs crossed. Elegant and nonchalant as always, wearing that flannel shirt as if it was a thousand dollar suit. Tony's eyes flickered over Steve's form and Steve became suddenly and embarrassingly aware of his half-nakedness.</p>
<p>”Do you mind?” he said as he quickly reached for the sweater on the chair.</p>
<p>He couldn't see Tony's smirk as he pulled the sweater over his head, but he saw it in his head with a disturbing level of detail: the way Tony's eyes crinkled in mirth, the way his mouth quirked up to one side, the intense brown of his eyes … No, Steve didn't need to see it. He heard it clearly enough in Tony's voice as he said:</p>
<p>”Come on, Cap. You don’t exactly have anything to be embarrassed about.”</p>
<p>Contradicting that statement, Steve’s neck burned with a rising blush as he turned and faced Tony again.</p>
<p>Why <em>was</em> he embarrassed? He'd changed in front of other men countless times during the war, where there had not been much time or space for privacy. It hadn't bothered him then, even though he'd still felt uncomfortable in his new, large body sometimes.</p>
<p>”What did you want, Stark?”</p>
<p>Tony stood up straight.</p>
<p>”What you said, earlier. ’Every time someone tries to win a war before it’s begun, innocent people die.’ Do you really believe that? Are you even basing that on anything? Or do you just feel more comfortable with good old man-on-man warfare than with technological solutions you don’t understand and can’t be part of?”</p>
<p>The blush Steve had felt crawling up his spine was quickly replaced by chills of a different kind of frustration.</p>
<p>”Technological solutions? What do they solve, Tony? I saw the images from Japan, you know. After the bombs. People crawling out of the fire. Men, women and children burnt so badly you could hardly recognize them as living. People trying to save them, not knowing, of course, that the radiation would turn out just as lethal as the fire. The shadows on the walls that was all that was left of some people. That was seen as a technological solution. A quick end to the war. And sure, maybe burning innocent people in your enemy's country indiscriminately by dropping a couple of bombs on them is not quite as low on the moral scale as singling out a specific group to round up and burn in ovens like so much diseased cattle, but it certainly isn't any more just.”</p>
<p>”War isn't just, Steve. I know that’s what they told your generation, but we've learned better. Innocent people get hurt in war, too.”</p>
<p>Steve scoffed. ”Yeah. I've noticed.”</p>
<p>A shadow fell over Tony’s face.</p>
<p>”You think that’s something new? Something we started since you went into the ice? No, Steve-o. Innocent people always get hurt. War destroys homes, jobs, infrastructure. Soldiers rape, torture and kill civilians, whether it’s following orders or breaking them. It always happens. The closest thing you get to a clean war is trench warfare, and how did that work out for your father's generation?”</p>
<p>Tony had stepped into the room, crossing his arms over his chest, and Steve instinctively stepped forward to match, as if they were actually going to brawl.</p>
<p>”That is not what a soldier is. Sure, there will always be opportunistic, twisted individuals in any large group of people, but that’s not …”</p>
<p>”That’s not what <em>you </em>are, Steve,” Tony interrupted. ”But, unfortunately for humanity, there are not a lot of people like you. Most of us, if you take us out of our comfort zone and put us in the chaos of war, that’s gonna change us, and not for the better.”</p>
<p>”It changed <em>you </em>for the better. ”</p>
<p>Tony fell silent. The silence stretched out, and Steve's guts slowly turned to ice as he realized he’d overstepped. Tony had only made the argument personal by hinting that he thought Steve was a better person than his peers (and maybe a little naive). Steve had gone and dragged up something that had clearly been a traumatic experience in Tony’s life and hinted that he should be grateful for that trauma.</p>
<p>”I didn't mean …”</p>
<p>”No,” Tony immediately interrupted, ”no, you're right. I am a better person for having been dragged by terrorists through enemy territory, had a car battery plugged to my chest, watched the man taking care of me die, and been forced to make this thing –” he tapped his finger against the arc reactor ”- and create the first prototype of the Iron Man suit to fight my way out of there. But none of that, Steve, none of <em>this</em>, means I wouldn't go back and give my life for those kids in that humvee. For the kid that was still alive when they took me, who they shot in the head. For the driver who died on impact. What the hell were they doing there? Why weren't they in America, with their families? Who decided they should fight? What the hell made me the ’innocent person’ in that scenario? Just being a civilian? I was the arrogant old asshole, they were just kids! You think preemptive measure is so morally dubious, but what's the difference between a group of people sitting pretty on this side of the sea deciding to deploy drones, or the same group of people deciding to deploy a bunch of kids who think some army camp will have made them ready for that shit?”</p>
<p>”How about respect for the enemy?" Steve said, unable to stop himself from raising his voice. "How about accountability? How about actual people deciding when someone has to die, instead of a machine? How about having the balls to look the other person in the eye? How about not accidentally shooting down farmers and bombing schools based on bad intel, or malfunctions?”</p>
<p>Steve took a deep breath. He'd felt sorry for Tony when he realized Tony had watched those soldiers die, which was clearly not something he'd ever been prepared for, but to use them as a defense for drone warfare … ”I don’t doubt your intentions, Tony. I know you want to protect people. But … but you’re right, war is ugly, and messy, and people don’t come back the same, if they come back at all. But you’re also wrong. People don’t just stop being people. Soldiers and officers on the ground <em>can </em>make the right decisions.”</p>
<p>”Or the wrong ones.”</p>
<p>”They can show mercy. Humanity. Forgiveness.”</p>
<p>”Or they can treat P.O.W.s like living dolls and laugh as they electrocute them.”</p>
<p>Steve flinched. He’d seen some of those pictures. He selfishly wished he hadn’t.</p>
<p>”I know the horrors humans are capable of inflicting on one another, Tony, I'm not stupid, I …”</p>
<p>He backed off and sat down on the quilted, flowery bedspread, a symbol of a world far removed from their subject. But he could feel the smell in his nostrils now, rising up from the dark. The smell of death.</p>
<p>And Tony thought Steve was naive. Tony thought he had too much faith in the goodness of humanity.</p>
<p>”Do you?” he heard Tony say. ”You spent your war in a special force fighting Hydra. So you've read up on the rest since you woke up, but …”</p>
<p>”We saw, okay?” Steve looked up at Tony as he decided to tell him, and Tony’s annoyed expression shifted into something unreadable as he took in the expression on Steve’s face.</p>
<p>”We ran into an SS patrol, in Poland. Just a few guys and a truck. It was dark, on this forest road, far from the nearest village. We took them out quick, so that they couldn’t report our position to Hydra. One of the younger soldiers got hit in the gut and didn’t die right away, but Jones had seen something and called us over before we could decide what to do about him. And … There had been people, in the truck. They had led them out into a clearing in the forest, made them dig a hole, lined them up …” He had to stop and take a deep breath again. ”… lined them up, and taken them one by one behind the cover of dirt heap, made them strip, and shot them, sending them falling straight into their grave.</p>
<p>"I … I still don’t really understand whether the rest of them actually didn’t understand what was going on, if they were in such a state of denial that they really believed they might walk away alive if they just followed orders … or if they’d just … just resigned themselves to death. It was like they were hypnotized. When we got there, there were only seven people still alive. I don’t know how many there were in the hole. Forty, fifty, sixty. More than you'd think would fit in that truck. One woman tried to jump down into the hole. Morita tried to stop her, but she was screaming in polish, and Dum-Dum told him to let her go. She crawled over those dead bodies and … She picked up the body of a little girl. Ten, twelve years old maybe. Couldn’t have been more than fifteen. And the woman cradled her in her lap and stroked her hair –” another deep breath ”- and the girl's skull was half crushed with the exit wound, and there was … there was brain matter getting caught in the woman's fingers and she didn’t even seem to notice. She was smiling and singing, as if the girl was alive. She didn’t respond to us. She didn’t respond to the other survivors, either. Most of them were silent, but this older lady talked, in Polish to her and in French to us. We managed to give the old lady instructions on where to bring the others, and get another allied unit to pick them up, but she couldn’t get through to the woman in the pit. She talked to Jones, in French, and Jones turned around and said: ’she says that the child was the woman's niece. She was the last family she had. She says it would be better for her if we shot her.’ So I took out … I was going to do it. But Bucky did it. Of course he did. He was our best shot. Always trying to save me from myself.”</p>
<p>Steve had to make a longer pause. His lips were dry, his mouth felt like sand. He could smell the stench from the pit. There shouldn't have been that bad of a smell, no one there had been dead long. But they’d been dirty. They’d spent a while in that truck, considerably longer than just what it would have taken to drive out from the nearest village. They’d been rounded up like cattle, possibly from a series of villages and small towns.</p>
<p>Tony hadn’t moved since Steve began telling the story.</p>
<p>”We couldn't even give them a proper burial. We had to cover up that pit to keep the animals from getting to them. And I thought, as we dug, ’we’re doing what <em>they</em> were planning to do. We're finishing <em>their </em>work. I don’t know if Dum-Dum was thinking the same thing, but as soon as we were done, he ran back to that soldier on the road, who was still wheezing and clinging to life somehow, and he stood over him and just … went berserk. Punched him over and over, and just screamed in rage. I had to tackle him to get him to stop. I know Bucky understood, but I think the others would have gladly watched Dum-Dum beat that boy to mush. Montgomery said the kid was dying anyway. We'd meant to kill him to begin with. Which was true. So I shot him. I just walked up and shot him right between the eyes. I couldn’t watch Dum-Dum do that. I couldn’t … I couldn’t let us turn into the thing we were fighting.” He looked up at Tony. ”But maybe a little part of you always does.”</p>
<p>”Steve …” Tony’s voice was soft now, and Steve couldn’t bear to hear the tone of pity in it, or the tone of horror.</p>
<p>”They called that a 'solution', Tony. And I’m sorry if I don’t understand the technological genius of your ideas, but every time I hear anyone, ally or enemy, talk about simple, one-step solutions to complex problems, I just hear … I just hear ’ultimate solution’. Well, I don’t believe in solutions anymore. I've spent my life fighting bullies, I did that before the war, I did it during the war, whether it was Hydra or an out-of-line Dum-Dum, and I no longer harbor any illusions that I won't be fighting bullies until the day I die, one way or another. And sometimes … sometimes the fight is where I feel the most at home. So you’re right about me. And you’re wrong.”</p>
<p>Tony’s eyes fell to the floor.</p>
<p>”Well, we both agree that my so-called solution certainly turned out to be anything but.”</p>
<p>”Yeah.”</p>
<p>Tony shook his head, met Steve’s eyes again, and that old familiar intensity was back. ”But I have to believe I can fix this, Steve. Not save all the world's problems in one fell swoop, not sell the world a solution to a fake problem to assuage their anxieties over the real ones. Just <em>clean up my own mess</em>. Just make sure that before I die the amount of people I've managed to save, to protect, is higher than the amount of people I’ve gotten killed. That’s all I want to do here, I need you to know that.”</p>
<p>”Okay. I believe you. And we will fix this, Tony. We'll find a way to stop Ultron.”</p>
<p>”Or you'll die trying, huh?”</p>
<p>Tony looked so wretched, that before Steve knew what he was doing, he'd gotten up off the bed and pulled Tony into a hug. ”We’ll stop him.”</p>
<p>And the ghostly smell of the pit full of corpses was chased away by the very real smell of Tony’s aftershave, musky and heady, smelling slightly like wood. To Steve’s surprise Tony hugged him back, and for a couple of seconds they stood there in silence, until Laura Barton shouted from downstairs: ”Okay everyone, dinner in fifteen minutes a d I mean it!” and Steve jumped back as if he'd been burnt.</p>
<p>
  <em>Or as if he’d been caught doing something he shouldn't.</em>
</p>
<p>"I ... I was gonna take a shower," he blurted out, rubbing his neck.</p>
<p>"You asking for company?" Tony said with a smirk that made Steve want to crawl out of his own skin.</p>
<p>"Tony!"</p>
<p>"Just a joke, just a joke, jeez. Thought I'd lighten the mood so we don't both come downstairs looking like death warmed over." Tony seemed to wince a bit at his own words at the end, but Steve didn't mind anything that would erase the image of Tony in the shower with him. He couldn't look at his friend and be thinking of ...</p>
<p>"See you in a moment."</p>
<p>"Yeah."</p>
<p>Tony left the room. Steve took a deep breath, and walked into the bathroom. It turned out there was no hot water left. That suited Steve fine. He turned his face up into the cold artificial rain and let it rinse away the smells of the past, the memories of naked bodies piling up, of a young enemy soldier's face beaten so badly that you couldn't really see where the bullet had gone in, of Bucky laid out in Hydra's base with god knew what being pumped into his blood, of the man in New York who had been prepared to bite down on cyanide to keep the secrets of Hydra, of a man with a soft German accent asking "so, you want to kill nazis?" He let it rinse away the memory of the folders he'd been handed by Fury when all this began, on Tony, and on Howard. The memory of what he'd seen in the vault underneath SHEILDs old base and what he had read in the files Nat had found on Bucky. He let it rinse away the lingering smell of Tony.</p>
<p>He dressed, took his things and walked downstairs to meet the others and pick the never-ending fight back up.</p>
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